.

^{© Clarissa Upchurch}

George Szirtes is a Hungarian-born poet and translator who came to Britain in 1956 as a refugee. He studied painting at the Harrow School of Art and the Leeds College of Art and Design before publishing his first book of poetry, The Slant Door, in 1979. In 2005 he won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his collection Reel. He has translated Hungarian poetry and drama into English, including works by Sándor Márai, Ottó Orbán, and László Krasznahorkai. He is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches at the University of East Anglia.

Paul Sweeten corresponded with George Szirtes by email.

Your relationship with English is often understood in terms of your absorbing it as a second language. You have lived in Britain for most of your life, so has this now become a journalistic preoccupation, or are there times when English still feels like a second language to you?

There are times—moments, especially when speaking Hungarian—when English does feel like a second language and, perhaps, no bad thing, at least some of the time. The sense of language as a material body is useful for any writer, especially a poet. I myself think it odd that I should be a poet in English: it is as if some distinct and fortunate transformation had occurred at an early age. But if so, I am inside the change, not outside, so journalistic preoccupations are perfectly valid.

Does that sense of language as a material body become heightened when translating? Christopher Ricks once described translations as “cover versions”; is that your sense of the process, and do you take many artistic liberties when translating Hungarian poets into English? How much George Szirtes, for instance, goes into your translations of Sándor Márai?

Yes, that sense of material body is heightened in translation: each language destabilises the other: that means we become more aware of the fallible body of each language. One language asks: Can you do that? The other replies: I can do this, which is like that. The first language cannot know if it is properly understood: language two understands there are some things it can’t do. Their joint experience is uncertainty of intention and meaning and the sense of limit in both. I like Ricks’s definition though. There is, after all, a genuine quality in Blondie’s version of “The Tide is High” that is not quite the same as the quality of the original by the more obscure Paragons. My Márai is not better than Márai, it is just a possible English Márai that depends entirely on the Hungarian Márai. As far as Anglophone readership goes, Márai was the Paragons and my version, with a bit of luck, is Blondie. The big difference is I don’t get fame and money whereas Blondie did.

“Taking liberties” suggests something faintly criminal, or at least improper. Is there a proper behaviour towards the the original text in poetry? How many different English interpretations do we have for, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”? There is an area of likely agreement but new readings continue to be offered. Which of the interpretations is the most proper? At what point does the reader begin to take liberties? I am generally within the sphere of propriety if only because I am aware of translating unknown poets, often for the first time. If Don Paterson translates Machado he feels no such obligation.

I’ve heard you talk about arriving in Britain with nothing but a book of photographs, and anyone familiar with your poetry will be aware of how important a role the captured image plays in it; there seems to be something of Keats’s Grecian urn figures at work, characters frozen in artifact. What do photographs mean to you?

I still have the case of photographs, though I have shared the actual photographs with my brother. My own mother was a photographer, and as a child, I remember watching her work at the light-box, retouching and hand-colouring. I wrote about these activities before I became as involved as I now am with photographs and photography. They are tied in with memories of mirrors (as in “At The Dressing Table Mirror”, a poem about the death of my mother, published in 1976). So mirrors and photographs are related. Broadly speaking, I think Barthes gets it right in Camera Lucida. The photographic moment is fascinating because it is by its very nature tragic, a memento mori. The moment has, by definition, gone. The record of the moment anticipates and includes the moment of going. Of course there are great photographers and ordinary snapshots. The great photographs are those where the image is not merely record but symbol. Everything is precisely where it had to be in order to generate a meaning beyond itself. Record and symbol are endlessly fascinating. Keats’s figures are frozen in a formalised moment, in a state of stylised desire. In that sense they too are potent symbols.

That symbolism in great photographs can hold an almost happenstance quality. It seems with painting there is more a sense of the artist’s hand; it’s a more contrived form, perhaps, but much of the beauty of poetry is in its contrivance. Did it feel like a natural transition to write poetry after studying painting?

I was writing before I started to paint, but I took to painting (at school, very late, after Christmas in my third year of Sixth) with great enthusiasm. There seemed to be the freedom to create one’s own cosmos in painting. Then there was all that glorious messy physical stuff. Language is the equivalent of that stuff. The power to create a cosmos is similar. I still love looking at paintings but am much more aware of them as constructions. Maybe part of getting older is the desire to be closer to life, as photographs seem to be.

The collection for which you won the T.S. Eliot Prize was Reel. I’ve always liked how tercets look on the page, and in that collection their spacing gives me the impression of a slide projector. How did you see that particular form working in relation to the other aspects of the poems?

The title poem of Reel is written in terza rima, as is a good part of the book—practically the whole of the first half, including “Meeting Austerlitz”, “Noir”, “Sheringham”, and “Flesh: An Early Family History”, a terza rima sequence with some eclogues in between the sections. I adapted Dante’s terza rima because it is an ideal episodic narrative form, (as in the Commedia) each verse clipping into the next, each section sufficient to articulate a central event. The slide projector effect you mention is for me a film clip that contains its own brief narrative, each episode part of a broad theme. There is, incidentally, a very new book, A Companion to Poetic Genre (ed. Erik Martiny), for which I wrote the terza rima chapter.

Having taught creative writing for a number of years and having kept a very active online blog, do you feel that the role of the public poet has been given greater breadth by these relatively recent developments—writing schools and worldwide discussion media—or are they merely incarnations of the kind of platforms to which writers have always had access? I don’t mean to say that you undertake public readings, teaching, blogging or anything else merely as “George Szirtes: Poet”, but your success has come at a time where writers are expected, to use Martin Amis’s word, to “perform”. Did you ever have a sense of that part of your life accelerating; after you won the Eliot, perhaps?

Inside that question nestle a good many others. There are various senses of the word “perform” here. The blog didn’t start out as performance, only in the sense that all writing is performative, but as notes that had an implicit, if unknown, public aspect. In other words I didn’t think the blog had anything directly to do with my fortunes as a poet. It was an interesting toy that made me think. It still does, though I am aware that it very quickly became an aspect of what you call, “George Szirtes: poet”. I do however believe my thoughts on this or that matter, as expressed on the blog, are read by some people with not much interest in poetry, let alone mine. In that respect I am “George Szirtes: human being (poet)”, a concept I rather like because of my growing belief that poetry is an aspect of being human, rather than an exclusive fully self-defining identity. I am, on the other hand, primarily known (if I am known at all) as a poet and a translator, albeit of a peculiar kind that might be described as George Szirtes: human being—English language writer of Hungarian birth, some links with Jewishness (poet and translator).

The question is partly whether I “perform” that. Larkin said he didn’t give readings because he couldn’t go round pretending to be himself. Any public appearance is a form of pretending to be oneself—and I mean a simple visit to the doctors where one behaves as one believes one should behave to doctors, just as much as being on stage as “George Szirtes: poet” not to mention all the other descriptive material. Performance is itself an aspect of human existence. What complicates matters is that for some time now publishers have depended on poets reading in public to sell the books because most bookshops don’t stock poetry, or only very little. At the same time an entire genre of “performance poetry” has developed in which the stage performance is of primary importance.

What did the Eliot Prize mean? In the first place it meant that three poets on one occasion chose my book over others. Three different poets on another day might have chosen something else. Nevertheless, the fact that they chose it meant that from then on I was one of a small group of poets who had been awarded the prize and that the prize would now enter the performative definition: George Szirtes (poet, Eliot Prize winner) plus the rest.

Frankly, I am with Larkin in some respects. I am glad of what the prize has brought me: a lot more attention, a lot more invitations, all those things you might call “acceleration”. The poetic vocation is psychologically insecure so it’s nice to be assured that the work is thought to be of some value. It is nice, but it is stupid to believe assurances. It is good that it should give one confidence to go on and try new things, but it would be stupid to go and do the same things all over again. Being a poet means living on one’s wits and nerves: those are best kept sharp. Best not be cosseted or flattered then. Plough on.

The role of the public poet? The public role of the poet? I don’t think I am a very public poet, but am aware modern technology has opened new channels of communication that, especially in the case of younger poets, has led to a new kind of consciousness. This may be more a matter of amplitude rather than of a radical change of kind. In any case, it has changed the old notion of being “public”: a whisper can very quickly become public material. I know I live in that world, that it swirls around me. I try to add the odd well formed sentence to it because doing that helps me think and has in some way modified the way I write poetry too. That is part of ploughing on.

Paul Sweeten graduated in 2010 with an MSt in Creative Writing from Kellogg College, Oxford. Paul is the editor-in-chief at the Oxonian Review.

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson detects a rot in the instruction of history. Sixty years ago, courses in Western civilisation offered sweeping narratives that required students to engage with classical texts and study the reasons for Western ascendancy. Today, Ferguson bemoans, students “have been encouraged to feel empathy with imagined Roman centurions and Holocaust victims, not to write essays about why and how their predicaments arose.” Ferguson’s recently released Civilization: The West and Rest (reviewed by Oliver Cussen in issue 15.6) seeks to return a focus to grand historical narrative, answering what Ferguson considers to be the most interesting question of Western historiography: how 11 empires came to control 58% of the world’s land surface and 79% of economic output. Ferguson enumerates six advantages—or “killer apps”—of the West: competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumerism, and work ethic. Together, they allowed the West to pull ahead of the “Rest”; however, Ferguson warns, these advantages are no longer the West’s preserve. Just as Westerners are beginning to lose faith in their cultural institutions, Easterners are “downloading” the apps that once created the conditions for Western supremacy. The 21st century, Ferguson concludes, may be defined by the precipitous decline of the West and the ascendancy of the East.

On Saturday, 9 April, Ferguson spoke to the Oxonian Review about Eastern ascendancy, the relationship between Western cultural institutions, and how to improve the instruction of history.

If the West is a set of cultural institutions and practices, why would the downloading of Western apps by the East not constitute an expansion of the West, rather than its decline?

That is an issue I address in the conclusion of the book by asking—particularly with reference to chapter 5—how far the consumer society represents a Westernisation of every society that it touches. At one level, we can celebrate the success of China and India emerging from poverty by using our killer applications. It’s just that the most successful of these consumer societies—China—has not downloaded all six. In particular, it isn’t interested—at least it doesn’t appear to be interested right now—in the idea of the rule of law, private property rights, and representative government: the John Locke app. So if China is going to become the largest economy in the world in the next ten years and increasingly a competitor for strategic dominance with the United States, I don’t think we can call this a triumph of Westernisation. This is a country that is still a one-party state and where, for example, an artist like Ai Weiwei can be simply arrested at Beijing airport after expressing criticism of the regime. I think there is some Westernisation going on in China—that is obvious in the way people dress—but to call this a complete triumph of Western civilisation is highly naïve.

What do you think the consequences are for Eastern ascendancy that all the Western apps haven’t been downloaded, particularly representative government?

The good news is that India has all these institutions. It’s just that they work rather slowly. One way of thinking of it is that India has the software but there are some bugs in the machinery that make it run super slowly. I’m an optimist about India, because I think those problems can be fixed and are being fixed. India is a free society in which you can criticise politicians for being corrupt, and we’ve just seen an enormous surge of public opinion in India about corruption, which is going to have a very [sizable] effect on Indian political life. It’s much harder for the Chinese to cope with the aspirations of their middle class…[because] there is no political channel to express dissent. If you look ahead to the 21st century in which there is an equal in economic terms to the United States and European Union in the form of China, but that this China is very emphatically not a free society, the potential for conflict is very obvious. And we already see it in a whole range of economic areas, and we are seeing it beginning in the scramble for commodities, which is rampant in Africa and South America—not to mention Australia—right now. And ultimately there is more reason to expect a breakdown in relations between the West and China than to expect them to carry on harmoniously.

Do you think there is any link between the apps insofar as having five apps would begin you on the path to acquiring the sixth?

They are presented in the book in a chronological sequence, and I’m implying that there is a causal relationship. The transition to representative institutions and the rule of law was a very important precursor of the successful industrialization of the English-speaking world. The fact that China has gotten as far as becoming an industrial superpower without the creation of free institutions is a cause for concern. It is a likely source of instability. I draw a parallel with Wilhelmine Germany in late 19th and early 20th centuries—a very dynamic economy but with a fundamentally deformed political system, which ultimately resorted to aggressive foreign policy rather than make meaningful concessions to the left. There is an interesting parallel to be drawn there, but one wouldn’t want to take it too far. The big unknown is the timing and nature of institutional change that will come to China. No one denies that some kind of change will come, but the timing of it is very hard to gauge. And my fear is that a regime like the Chinese regime, faced with economic and social challenges, will be quite tempted to resort to nationalism to legitimise itself. We’ve already seen that happen in some degree.

Is it the case that in the West we’ve lost faith in our apps?

I think to some extent we have, although it’s very hard to generalise now because there are so many very profound differences between—say—the United States and Europe. What I see is a mindset in which the last 500 years is primarily understood through the prism of imperialism and the crimes of the West against the Rest. By emphasising empire in the narrative of modern history, we make a major mistake, because the least interesting thing about Western civilisation is that it engaged in imperialism. Everybody did that. All civilisations of any real note have engaged in some kind of imperialist expansion. The original, interesting things about the West are not slavery and not conquest. The interesting things are the innovations in the realm of science or political institutions or economic life. Those are the novel things. My sense is that the way we think about our past now, the way that we teach kids in school, underplays the importance of—to take one other example—the work ethic. So I do think we are in danger of undervaluing our own civilisation and doing the thing that’s fatal: we are failing to transmit its values to the next generation.

You’ve written that this transformation in the instruction of history is rooted in the 1960s. Is there a reason for the de-emphasis of Western values?

I think there is a close link between the political left and a shift in the way in which the content and the form of teaching were conceived. The New History, insofar as it was a movement in this country, was partly a design to transform historical methods and to move away from the idea that history is “one fucking thing after another”—in the famous Allen Bennett phrase. There was a political angle to that because it was supposed to be displacing Our Island Story—a caricatured version of British history that sprung from Macaulay and turned into an early 20th-century textbook. I’m not arguing for going back to Our Island Story. But I think it would help to have some kind of story beyond the wickedness of empire in the way we understand the period from 1500 to the relatively recent past.

I don’t want to make this too simplistic. A lot of what has happened in history education has been the law of unintended consequences. I certainly don’t think Kenneth Baker, when he was education secretary, had any clue what the national curriculum would mutate into after it was created. But I think there’s a problem, and I think the problem is there in a generation that is leaving school with a very, very jumbled and fragmentary knowledge of the past. Very few people would dissent from that despite the attempts of school inspectors like Ofsted to claim that everything is fine.

How do you reconcile reorienting the curriculum to teach an overarching narrative with educating students to examine primary sources?

There is a need for realism about how much in the way of historical methodology you can teach a 12-year-old kid, and I think there is a somewhat disingenuous belief that you can teach the methods of professional historians to preteens who don’t even know whether the Enlightenment came before or after the Renaissance. I think you’ve got to walk and then run. And teaching sources and methods first—in my experience talking to kids—is not a particularly effective way in engaging them. Indeed, if you talk to both teachers and school children doing Key Stage 3 and GCSE, they mostly ridicule the source analysis. And I don’t blame them. If you look at what they are asked to analyse, it is usually one paragraph. It is a parody; a sort of caricature of what we do. And that’s really why, in some way, I am in revolt against that approach. I don’t think they’re in fact really learning historical methods; I think it’s a charade. And it would be far better [teaching] some historical knowledge, facts, and then worrying about the methodology when they’re a little bit older. It’s all about getting people to study history in the long term. Right now you can stop at 13, which is crazy.

How would you change the way history is taught at the university level?

In one fundamental way. In my experience, both at Oxford and at Harvard, far too little of the philosophy of history is taught. And faint runs through historiography are no substitute for a proper grounding in philosophy as a subject. You probably haven’t been asked to read RG Collingwood or Michael Oakeshott or Benedetto Croce or any of the philosophers who grasped and grappled with the issues of historical thought…The thing I would change if I had some control over our graduate programme at Harvard [is to] make every single PhD student do a foundational course in historical philosophy in year one.

William Kolkey is reading for a DPhil in History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the executive editor of the Oxonian Review. Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxonian Review.

Born in 1966, David Nicholls worked as an actor and as a screenwriter before shooting to fame as the author of One Day in 2009. Nicholls had previously achieved recognition for two earlier novels—Starter for Ten (2003) and The Understudy (2005)—and for a number of screenplays, including And When Did You Last See Your Father (2007), and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008).

A best-selling phenomenon since its publication in June 2009, One Day has been translated into 37 languages and sold in excess of 700,000 copies. Behind the book’s garish orange airport-fiction covers lies a carefully crafted masterpiece of British popular fiction. Spanning 20 years in the lives of its two endearingly flawed and irrepressibly likeable characters—the handsome, rakish, tender Dexter Mayhew and the witty, frumpy, principled Emma Morley—the narrative follows the tortuous trajectories of the protagonists’ lives and the fluctuations in their warm but tumultuous relations.

[Warning: this interview contains spoilers.]

One Day has been an astounding success in Britain and abroad. What is it about the novel that has struck such a chord?

I have no idea really. Perhaps because the book is both funny and emotional, a mixture of light and shade. There’s an old movie poster cliché which promises that “you’ll laugh, you’ll cry”, but it’s actually quite rare to find a story in which humour, drama, and emotional grip are combined. There is a good amount of contemporary, accessible, more or less well-written comic fiction—High Fidelity, Bridget Jones, possibly Starter for Ten. To find comedy and tragedy blended together is more unusual, and that may be part of One Day’s appeal. And I think the book has fared the better for being based on a really good structural idea—one that nobody, to my knowledge, had used before.

The idea being to organize the narrative around the return of the same calendar date each year. Thus “one day”—St Swithun’s Day—runs as a connecting thread through two decades of your characters’ lives. How did the conceit suggest itself to you?

The idea came from Tess of the D’Urbervilles. There’s a passage in Hardy’s novel in which Tess gazes at herself in the mirror and a shiver runs down her spine at the thought that perhaps this is the date on which she’ll die. She realizes that while we mark the date of our birthday each year, we also unwittingly go through the anniversary of our death time after time. I thought it would be interesting to write about this anniversary, but as in real life, not to let on, to withhold the significance of the day in question and let the reader imagine that this might be an ordinary date, or a date chosen as the anniversary of some other event, only revealing at the end that it is, in fact, the anniversary of a death. That seemed to me a compelling twist. The concept also offered some handy solutions to some of the technical problems that confront a novelist: how to manage time and place, how to condense large swathes of time. Novelists tend to focus on the obviously significant events, like marriages and deaths. I wanted to use the “one day” structure to find significance in apparently insignificant episodes—a bad night out at a party, an awkward encounter, a disappointing date, a hair-rising babysitting episode.

Why did you choose to set the novel on St Swithun’s Day (15th July)?

For a number of reasons. The novel opens on graduation night, and 15th July is a plausible date for a graduation ceremony. I didn’t want a date that carried any weight, like 4th July or 14th February: 15th July felt suitably random. But I also needed a date, which, when seen in a diary, might conjure up a memory for the protagonists. “St Swithin’s Day” was to work as a kind of mental tag. I liked the mythology of St Swithin’s Day [according to old British lore, the weather on St Swithin’s Day predicts rain or sun for the next forty days: "St Swithin’s day if thou dost rain / For forty days it will remain / St Swithin's day if thou be fair / For forty days 'twill rain nae mair"], which is really about our desire and inability to predict the future. Thematically that seemed right. And there’s a really beautiful melancholy song about lost love by Billy Bragg that is called “St Swithin’s day”. To me that song was the unofficial soundtrack to the book. It helped me with the writing when I was stuck for words or tone.

Six epigraphs punctuate the book—there is one by Philip Larkin, two by Charles Dickens, one by James Salter, and two by Thomas Hardy. What role do these quotations play?

They’re really just apposite extracts from favourite books…almost like favourite lines from songs. The Hardy epigraph is key because it signposts the source of the novel’s anniversary structure. Coming immediately after Emma’s death, it proffers a kind of explanation, revealing why we’ve had our eyes so staunchly trained on this particular date.

The Dickens quotation enjoins the reader to “Imagine one selected day struck out of [any life] and think how different its course would have been.” This would seem to place contingency or perhaps fate at the heart of the book?

Yes. I grew up reading Hardy and Dickens, and in Hardy especially there’s a lot of emphasis on fate. While I was writing the book I was adapting Tess for the BBC, and I was struck anew by my own frustration and fury when the letter which might have saved Tess’s life disappears under the doormat. I remember feeling a little angry at the author for the contrivance. In life I firmly believe that we make our own destiny, but in fiction such seemingly fatalistic moments can be very compelling.

You put your characters through quite a lot in the course of the book. Does it feel at all like playing God with people’s lives?

Maybe. I don’t know if I feel sort of god-like in terms of having control over the characters, but I did want to emulate the ups and downs of real life, and for me that meant drawing on some terrible events in my own circle. Two of my friends died while I was writing the book. When you’re young you often have a very conventional notion of how the rest of your life will unfold: you think that first there will be a certain amount of floundering about and then you’ll start a family, find a job, work until 65, and then retire. You don’t expect tragic events to happen before you reach 40. I was very shaken by those deaths. And I’d read a number of books in which the death of a central character had come completely out of the blue. I’d found that very powerful—far more powerful than the traditional lingering deathbed farewell. I wanted these sudden, painful events to happen in my book as they do in life—without warning, without premonition, without too much tell-tale pathetic fallacy (although actually there is a little bit of pathetic fallacy in One Day when it begins to rain at a crucial moment).

The novel is infused with a kind of impassioned tenderness for youth, in all its idealism and its hopefulness. Is the book also driven by a terror of ageing?

Not terror, no. I really loved university. I was very aware of life changing, and of books and films and music and friendship being at the root of that change. I remember becoming more open-minded and embracing friendship. But I don’t have a fear of ageing. Actually I’m rather happier at 44 than I was at 28. I suppose it is true that, like Emma in the later stages of the book, I miss the intensity of youth—even if it is often the intensity of frustration or anxiety or unrequited love. The highs and lows of being 17 or 21 or even 28 are so much greater than the highs and lows of being 44. The arguments you have, the crushes, the sudden passions, the friendships, the zealous enthusiasms for a film or a book or a poem, the lack of embarrassment: I feel nostalgic for all of these, I do miss all of that. Yet at the same time I’m pleased to be rid of the attendant angst and madness. Middle age brings an even-tempered, level-headed open-mindedness to other political ideas and cultural preferences. It’s all far more sensible and equitable but not nearly as passionate.

A blurb on the back of the book describes One Day as a “fantastic Labour boom-years comedy”. Is the book partly about society or about a particular economic situation? Is it a critique or diagnosis?

I don’t think so. I really don’t want to become a kind of pundit, whatever my personal politics. What One Day I hope, is a book about political disillusionment, about selling out, or about the cliché that you necessarily go from being a socialist at 20 to a conservative at 40. The book isn’t about a loss of principle or a drift to the right. Emma is just as principled at the end as she is at the beginning. But the world around her has changed. The book opens in the late 80s, at a time when the political battle lines were clearly drawn. The major issues of the day—apartheid, the relationship between East and West, the CND—were starkly defined: the distinctions between right and left at that time were almost cartoonishly polarised. But after the resignation of Margaret Thatcher and the end of apartheid and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, you were suddenly left with Yugoslavia and the environment, and it was quite difficult to have a straightforward view on either subject. At one point in the book Emma tries to work out why she’s not marching about the war in Yugoslavia: she’d like to know where she stands, or where she should stand, but just can’t quite make sense of it all. The only real political point in the novel, I suppose, is that the old political demarcations became blurred in the 90s.

Do you feel your style has changed much since Starter for Ten?

The most significant shift is probably the shift from first- to third-person narration. When I started writing prose, first-person narration came naturally to me. It was a bit like acting or improvising. It was about getting into character. I found it quite easy to write in that mode. But if I re-read Starter for Ten now I’d wriggle a bit. I think the comic set-pieces are good and the voice is good, but it reads like a book written by a stand-up comedian angling for gags. In One Day, with characters like Emma and Dexter bouncing off each other in dialogue, the narrator doesn’t need to be looking for jokes in the same way. Also, by the time I started writing One Day I was no longer worried about serious, non-comic passages boring the reader. Having written scripts for TV that were not comedies, I was a little more confident of my ability to write a straight scene.

What pleases you most about how others have described the style of the book?

“Readability” springs to mind, but that’s probably the wrong word. I’m pleased when people say that they’ve read the book in one or two sittings. A lot of the writers I admire are not writers that you would think of as unputdownable. Novelists aren’t necessarily economical, nor should they be. Philip Roth or J.D. Salinger don’t need to be economical to ensure that their readers keep turning the pages because their prose is so superb and compelling in itself. I pay more attention to story. I concentrate on keeping things moving.

Do you think your work in screenwriting shaped One Day’s delightfully quick-witted dialogue?

I’m not sure. Watching a lot of movies probably had more to do with it. And the habit of acting scenes out in my head, trying to work out the pace and the phrasing and the rhythm, imagining performance. Graham Greene thought of writing as acting, and I relate to that. When he’d finished writing he’d feel tired because he’d spent the whole day getting up and down, crossing the room, and opening doors—without having actually left his chair.

How do you feel about the film adaptation of One Day, for which you’ve written the screenplay?

I feel a certain amount of trepidation. I’ve read the newspapers enough to know that after anything goes well there’s often a backlash. In adapting a book for the cinema, you inevitably have to make a lot of cuts. As a novelist you are completely in charge, but as a screenwriter you have a very limited area of influence. You have so many parameters. If I’m writing a book and I want it to rain, I just write “it’s raining”. On screen you have to fight for the rain because it costs so much money and it’s not your money. It’s a much more contentious process. If I had my way I would be in charge of the music and the poster and the casting and the design. But as the author of the book you have to take a step back. There are things that I would have done differently if I were directing, but overall I’m quite pleased with the outcome. As long as people don’t expect a page by page transcription, I think they’ll find the film is pretty close to the book they know.

The director, Lone Scherfig, is famous for An Education (2009), but also for the earlier Italian for Beginners (2000), which achieves a highly affecting blend of romance and gritty emotional realism.

That’s why Lone was everyone’s first choice. She’s interested in engaging the audience with the story and the characters but also has great artistic integrity. She doesn’t like fakery or manipulation. As a Dogme-95 artist, she won’t put a song on the soundtrack if it doesn’t fit the scene. The film is emphatically not a Hollywood version of One Day.

Which British writers do you admire and whom do you enjoy reading?

I like Zadie Smith’s work very much. I particularly enjoyed On Beauty. She’s ambitious and engages with the world, but she’s unpretentious and writes very accessible books. She’s interested in character and story and is a really fine comic writer. But her prose also has a wry, wise quality. I admire Alan Hollinghurst. The Line of Beauty was a terrific book. It’s neither startlingly modernist nor abstract nor inaccessible, but it’s a carefully, beautifully written book in the classic British realist tradition. And I love Edward St Aubyn. His style is arch, precise, spiky, mean, cynical. I think he’s an extraordinary, underrated writer.

You’re frequently described as a popular fiction writer. How comfortable are you with the label?

When I was at university all the writers I admired were experimentalists. In my early 20s I loved Beckett, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Brecht, and other modernist greats. If I ever tried to write anything I thought I had an obligation to be progressive and avant-garde. But I had no gift for that and over time I came to realise that I’d be much better off writing situation comedy. Writing in an abstract or poetic way doesn’t come naturally to me—even if a lot of the writing I most appreciate is abstract, poetic, and difficult. In fact if I hadn’t written Starter for Ten I’m not sure if I would have read it when it first came out. I think I’d probably have been a bit of a snob about it.

For more information see http://www.davidnichollswriter.com/

Scarlett Baron is a fellow by examination at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University and one of the world’s leading string theorists. His first book, The Elegant Universe, introduces general readers to physicists’ quest for a “theory of everything” and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His second, The Fabric of the Cosmos, covers the evolution of our concepts of space and time, and was a New York Times bestseller. In 2008, Greene created the World Science Festival, an annual week-long affair geared toward general audiences which assembles leading authorities from around the world to discuss central issues raised by developments in science and the connections between science and other areas of inquiry and of life.

His new book, The Hidden Reality, explains the many ways in which the concept of parallel universes emerges naturally from current research in theoretical physics, and argues that what we typically conceive of as our own universe may turn out to be a miniscule portion of a much vaster “multiverse”.

Among other things, Greene spoke to the Oxonian Review about parallel worlds, the new atheism, and the relationship between sciences and the humanities. This interview was made possible by St Cross College and the St Cross Science Lecture Series.

In your book, you explain how physicists invoke the idea of a multiverse to explain things that our current theories simply postulate—for example, things like the electron’s mass and charge and the cosmological constant. Do you ever imagine a situation in which we’ll have a theory that won’t make us feel compelled to look for deeper explanations? Assuming that some of the multiverse proposals that you describe in your book are correct, do you think they could finally quell our need to keep asking why questions?

No, I think it’s hard to really imagine in any realistic or semi-realistic sense that we’d come to an understanding that eliminates the capacity to ask further “why” questions. Multiverse or not, whatever proposal is on the table, one can always say, “why those laws, why that approach, why that framework?” Now in the best of all worlds, you can imagine that we come to such a deep understanding that logical consistency alone would dictate a particular scientific physical framework and to deviate from that would be to abandon logic. If we could find a theory that was that tightly constructed and that inevitable in its formulation, then maybe there wouldn’t be any further why questions.

But we’re so far from anything like that that what we’re really talking about here is pretty fanciful.

Do you think that’s even a possibility that logic alone will uniquely dictate a theory?

Well, logic supplemented with some very rudimentary observations. For instance I could imagine that if you demand that the universe have gravity and quantum mechanics, that perhaps those features alone would be enough to dictate a physical framework that embraces them in a logically consistent way. But again, we’re far from that.

Do you feel that you get anything out of writing the books in terms of your own understanding of the material—either in terms of having to consolidate it or explain it in simple language?

Yeah, very much so. My approach to writing these books is a) you’ve got to know the material deeply and b) you then need to be able hone in on those aspects that are really central and be able to carve away the parts that, while important mathematically for detailed research, are not critical for the general reader to fully understand or be aware of. And then [you need to] find a way of framing it that is interesting and accessible to the general reader. I have found that research projects have come out for me from that process, so it does help clarify my own thinking for sure.

A number of leading scientists are deeply religious. Do you think it’s possible to reconcile deeply held metaphysical religious belief in God with established claims of theoretical physics, or do you think that when serious scientists are religious, it’s because they keep their work and their spiritual lives separate?

I think there’s a compatibility as long as your religious sensibility’s not literal. If you try to literally interpret teachings of the Bible you run smack into some pretty significant problems with what we’ve discovered in science. But if you’re willing to view religion more in a Spinozan or even Einsteinian way—that there is an overarching order and harmony that the laws of physics represent and reveal, and that order and harmony, if you want, ascribe it to some deeper theological origin—then I don’t think science has much to say about that. What science is pretty good at ruling out is the so-called “God of the gaps”—the traditional way of invoking God whenever there’s something in science that we haven’t figured out. The problem is, once we figure it out, that particular invocation of God is no longer necessary; it gets pushed to the side. So that’s a recipe for God getting squeezed to the margins. But if you don’t view God as the reservoir of temporary answers to issues we haven’t solved scientifically, but rather as some overarching structure within which science takes place, and if that makes you happy and satisfied, so be it. I don’t see the need for that; others do.

How do you feel about the “new atheism” that’s become prevalent especially in the writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens?

There’s much in it that resonates with me because I personally don’t find the need to invoke religious explanation. On the other hand, as a strategy for spreading a scientific worldview, I don’t know how effective it is. I think those [who are already atheist] can nod their head in agreement. I don’t know how many people are convinced by [Dawkins's and Hitchens's] approach, so that their previous religious perspective no longer is one worthy of attention. I wonder if any studies have been done; I don’t know. My own approach is less confrontational, less antagonistic. Some of that crowd have called me an accommodationist because of that.

Have you spoken to them?

Not directly. I’ve seen unflattering comments here and there. (Smirks.) For instance, at the World Science Festival, we’ve had a program each year called Faith and Science, which some of that community have questioned: does that belong in a science festival? My view is absolutely. A science festival is a wonderful environment in which the long reach of science…can be described and exposed and discussed and made exciting. And a good fraction of the world’s population does have a religious perspective, so to have a conversation about how science reaches into some of the issues that others have long thought were solely the purview of religion, I think that’s a good conversation to have.

Do you see a division or antagonism between the cultures of the sciences and humanities?

I see a division between the two cultures insofar as society has willfully allowed people to be okay about not knowing science, but has not allowed them to be okay about not knowing humanities and art. I think that is one of the major barriers that we need to tear down in order that science take its rightful place in the culture alongside music, art, theatre, dance, literature as something that you cannot dispense with [if you want to] consider yourself educated [and] engaged in the world conversation. And slowly, I think, that will happen.

When Larry Summers made his remarks about women in science, what was your feeling about the remarks themselves and also about the academic community’s reaction to them?

It’s not one of those things I followed in great detail…But extracting away from what he did or did not say or what he did or did not mean, the notion that women are not well-equipped to succeed in science is one that’s clearly false and certainly got him into hot water. Regardless of what he meant, that was how it was interpreted. I think that our charge in the scientific community is to open the field up more broadly so that there are more role models in science for women and for minorities, because that ultimately is what gets the young kids excited. You see someone like yourself succeeding in cosmology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and that fires you up to try to follow in their footsteps.

Science and especially physics seems to suggest a view of the world in which reality is reducible to mathematical laws. Scholars outside the sciences are more likely to be hostile to the view that everything, including human experience, can be reduced to something so coldly mechanistic. Do you see any potential for reconciliation between these two points of view?

I would say it’s more than arts or humanities. I would say there’s a more general tendency to find larger purpose or meaning that, when reality’s reduced to laws and particles and equations, feels somehow devoid of meaning. My view is that there’s a barebones reality within which we exist and we tell ourselves stories and we build ourselves narratives to try to inject meaning on top of it, but ultimately that’s a human undertaking—a valuable one, an important one, but not one that I think the universe comes equipped with from the get go.

Josh Rosaler is reading for a DPhil in Philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford. Josh is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Ken Loach
Route Irish
Sixteen Films, 2011
109 minutes

…

…

Ken Loach has been directing films with a social mission for 50 years. In the 60s he brought the housing crisis to national attention with Cathy Come Home, in the 80s he documented the trade union response to Thatcherism, and recently he has addressed issues as diverse as the Spanish Civil War (Land and Freedom), Los Angeles labour rights (Bread and Roses), and the Irish War of Independence (The Wind That Shakes the Barley).

His latest project, Route Irish, combines his outrage at a war of aggression with his indignation at negligent employment practices. When Frankie, a private security contractor, is killed in Baghdad, his childhood friend Fergus decides to lead his own personal investigation into his death, and in the process brings to light the dubious record of the private security firms involved in the war.

The Oxonian Review spoke with Ken about Route Irish, the film industry, and British politics.

Throughout your career you’ve used film to explore social and political problems. Can film go beyond that and offer actual solutions?

Film is one voice among many. A film can ask questions, it can leave you with a sense that there’s more to be found out, it can leave you with a sense of solidarity with the people you see in the film. It can do all those things, but it’s not a political movement, it’s not an organisation. It’s only a film; it’s just two hours of stories and characters—or it could be a documentary—but it’s information, a perspective, and maybe an argument, maybe a point of view. What you do with what you receive from the film is up to you.

The structure of Route Irish resembles your earlier films Land and Freedom or Carla’s Song; the narrative follows your protagonist’s personal journey of self-discovery and this unravels into wider issues.

It’s not a journey of personal discovery in this case. He’s just finding stuff out, but he’s not discovering himself. His self is pretty well wrecked, really, throughout the film. The film reveals that wreckage, but he doesn’t reveal it to himself, about himself.

He’s a career soldier, who’s been through different war zones; he’s been to Ireland, probably been to Afghanistan, he’s been to Iraq. He’s come to the end of his army life, and he’s found that he can sign up as a contractor and earn money—rather more than he ever did as a soldier, so obviously that’s a good option for a few years. But the effect of being through Iraq in particular has left him, like many others, with post-traumatic stress, and that gap becomes apparent throughout most of the film. He manages to contain his problems, but every now and then the violence flares up. He’s quite obsessive, and he expresses himself through violence. This becomes apparent through his relationship with Rachel, Frankie’s girlfriend. There’s obviously a more complicated relationship between them than just platonic friends. He reveals himself that way, and reveals his despair, and his hollowness, the fact that he is destroyed.

One of the nurses who nurse people with this problem said that these men are in mourning for their former selves. They’re not the men they expected to be and intensely wanted to be. The sense of that former self is shown right at the outset with the two boys on the Mersey Ferry; they’re talking, dreaming of where they might travel when they’re older. The irony is that they do travel, and it kills one and it destroys the other.

Often at the centre of these films is a potentially redeeming romantic or sexual relationship. Is that a way of figuring solidarity?

The story before the film began, we imagined, was that Fergus—I think this is referred to briefly—had introduced [Rachel and Frankie], and he’d known her before that. There was something between them before she became Frankie’s partner. Frankie is an easier guy altogether, he’s more gregarious, he has his feet on the ground more than Fergus, who’s the edgy, driven one. So there was something between Fergus and Rachel, which certainly remains something in Fergus’s eyes. But the only way he can express that is in this violent transgressive way when Frankie’s dead. So it’s not so much a love interest. It’s part of his fractured connection to other people. The normal emotional exchange that happens between people is denied to him because of what he’s been seeing, what he’s been part of, and how it’s left him.

Route Irish is on general release on the 18th March…

It’s quite a limited release actually. One of the problems of cinema now is that you have to struggle for every cinema you can get if you’re an independent film. Films can be made and are being made all around the world that are very interesting and diverse. And that happens to a varying degree depending on the climate in individual countries. Our situation [in Britain] is that the screens are pretty well dominated by American industrial films that take a large percentage of screen time, with British films that the Americans like occasionally getting a look-in. Apart from that, cinema from the rest of the world is by and large excluded, unless you live near art-house cinemas like the Watershed in Bristol or the Phoenix Picturehouse on Walton Street in Oxford. There are a few of those cinemas around, but by and large, independent cinema, or non-American mainstream cinema, doesn’t get a look-in. That is the biggest issue facing cinema at the moment: how do you enable people to see that diverse range of films?

Sixteen Films, your production company, has published several of your earlier films on YouTube, and you’re releasing Route Irish simultaneously on Curzon Demand.

Yes. Otherwise, when there is press coverage of it, however much there is, if the film is only available in maybe 20 cinemas around the country, then although people may read about it and hear about it and want to see it, many will not be able to. So we thought we really needed an alternative approach to this.

What do you think of the Internet as a medium? Some say it has collective potential, but on the other hand, it has a tendency toward atomism…

It exists, so we can’t wish it away. It’s there and people will use it the way their inclination leads them. It does make it easier for people to be in touch with like-minded people. It makes it easier to organise at one level. On the other hand it is probably more difficult to organise at another level. I don’t know how you get democratic organisation into it. I don’t know how you get beyond the word getting out; people get together, and then what? You’ve got to embody some democratic structure or some cohesive sense.

Speaking of people getting together, you once said that Supporters Direct and the football supporters’ trusts movement was perhaps the one good, worthwhile achievement of New Labour.

It was a Labour government achievement, but probably wasn’t a New Labour initiative. They were probably biting their tongues as they did it. It’s a piddling little thing but at least it’s a move in the right direction. And the people involved are very good. I’ve got a lot of respect for Dave Boyle and the others involved there.

Do you think there might be some potential in a renewed alliance between the Labour Party and some of those sorts of movements, given it was in part a creation of a certain wing of the Labour party?

I think people would be deeply suspicious of the Labour Party for all kinds of reasons. The people in the supporters’ trusts would resent being hijacked into a party. The Labour Party itself is a pretty broken organisation now anyway. Their silence on the current situation is deafening. There’s no leadership coming from them to fight the various attacks on the different services, the destruction of so much of what remains of the good collaborative aspects of our society.

The attacks are so trenchant and the Labour Party is so weak that I can’t see that it would work at all. There’s a great possibility for organisations to build an opposition. And out of the experience of the supporters’ trusts, people could be lead to thinking: “we’re a cooperative movement, there are other cooperative movements; maybe we have something in common.” Then you start to link up, but the links have got to be based on lived experience, rather than a main political party.

So would you abandon the Labour Party now?

The Labour Party has already abandoned the Labour movement. That’s the problem. Inevitably there are, and always will be, a few good MPs—John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn—but beyond that, the Blairite cleansing has wiped most of the good people out of the party. But there is great potential on the left because the attacks from the right are so strong.

What sort of organisations do you think there is potential in?

The people who are facing problems in their own affairs. People who work in the health service, people who work in universities, people who work in schools, people who work in housing, particularly with the homeless, disabled people, librarians, people who care for the forests, the police, pensioners. Everybody who’s got a pension is being savaged. Particularly public servants; nowadays public servants are just referred to with contempt as “bureaucrats”.

[The Coalition government] have offended a huge percentage of the population. If all these people got together they could stop it. But because the organisation of places like the TUC is so weak, they’re massively handicapped. That’s the problem. And that’s what the Tories rely on; they rely on there being no coherent alternative.

*Route Irish will have a multi-platform release, opening in cinemas, on Sky Movies Box Office, and on Curzon Demand, March 18 2011.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. They are senior editors at the Oxonian Review.

Philip Ball
Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People
Bodley Head, 2011
384 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1847921529

…

…

In Unnatural, Philip Ball considers the cultural history of anthropoeia, “people making”, exploring how mythology—from alchemical formulae for creating homunculi (little people) to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—inform and reflect attitudes toward unnatural life. Ball detects in these myths either suspicion, distrust, or disapproval of artificial life, concluding that the mythology of anthropoeia has prejudiced the modern mind into initially mistrusting scientific interventions in the creation of life, such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF), cloning, and gene manipulation. On Thursday, 24 February, Ball spoke at Blackwell’s in Oxford about how the mythology of anthropoeia negatively shapes our perception of the “unnatural”, and argued that the science of anthropoeia should be judged on its own terms.

Your book treats the conceptualisation of the natural and unnatural through the history of Western mythology, and makes the point that artificial life is often stigmatized as “unnatural”. Considering that contemporary advances in the artificial creation of life, such as IVF, often blur the boundary between what is natural and unnatural, is there a value anymore in distinguishing between the two terms?

I think there are two ways that you can make that distinction. One distinction made generally by scientists is to talk about things that are natural and artificial, and even in science that is not an easy distinction to make. It’s not clear where the dividing lines are. We have plenty of examples of things, including organisms, that are part natural and part made by some kind of technological intervention. But that distinction is different from the one between natural and unnatural. My contention in the book is that to call something unnatural is not to say that it is unnatural because it’s not made by nature; it is to say that it is supposed to be condemned, disapproved of. It is a moral judgment.

There is a linguist’s discussion that this prefix “un” has that [negative] connotation. It’s really inviting you to disapprove, to feel uneasy about something. And I think that distinction has never really had any basis in science. I think ultimately it is a theological distinction. And while I think people are inevitably going to keep using those terms, I want to make it explicit that, when we call something unnatural, that’s what’s really going on in our minds.

You argue that we invoke myths of anthropoeia to express our anxieties about scientific attempts to manipulate the processes of life creation. Of course, these myths were not originally intended to serve as critiques of IVF or cloning, so what was their original purpose?

Although [Westerners before the late 20th century] did not have the technological means to create life, that does not mean they did not believe it was possible. Quite the opposite, the myths show [that belief in artificial life existed]: there are stories of artificial statues or beings created by alchemical means, etc. Those debates were still going on.

The question is what myths were for and what they are for. What they are not for is some kind of prognosis of what’s going to happen in the future. That’s the problem. Myths are often seen as “this is where things are inevitably going to lead; things are inevitably going to go badly.” Myths are much more about our fears of what happens in the everyday, mundane sense. So the myths about monstrosities or monstrous births are fears about the possibility of that happening anyway in natural conception…Myths are about what’s going on in the human mind: our nightmares, our worries.

Are myths about anthropoeia purely an expression of our anxieties? Do they serve a didactic purpose?

There is certainly an argument that they may be a codification of taboos. You might say that about incest in Oedipus. But it seems to me that a lot of those taboos don’t need to be shored up by myth. Myths are about fears…Their main purpose is not to persuade us to do something or not to do something. It isn’t to persuade us how we should live; it’s a deeper exploration of what’s going on in the human psyche: our fears and our hopes and our dreams.

Can we learn anything from myths that could positively shape debate over anthropoeia?

It’s not clear to me that there’s any deep wisdom in myths that will help us find our way through the ethical dilemmas we’re confronted with. There are things in myths that are relevant and well worth listening to, but they’re not going to tell us what to do about stem cell research…But it seems to me that we have to confront these technologies regarding the real possibilities that they raise for better or worse, rather than the imaginary ones that no scientist is interested in doing or would contemplate…

It’s striking that in Brave New World, and many dystopian tales of [anthropoeic] technologies, the dystopia is already imposed. It’s already there and already something that’s happened to society that condones [for example] the rearing of children by the state without access to their genetic parents. The implication is that these technologies will lead to that, but the stories already have those totalitarian dystopias in place, and the technologies are injected into them. Sometimes we get it the wrong way around. We use Brave New World as a stick to beat these new technologies…There is no argument in Brave New World for why exogenesis would lead to that kind of state. That’s something that state decided it would do.

How do we go about legislating limitations on the research or practice of artificial life creation? Do we first create an ethical framework to inform legislation, or do we first consider other factors, like utility?

I’m wary about using any ethical framework for answering these questions. We’d find that, once the technology has moved on, the ethical framework has dissolved…We don’t have the ethical tools, the ethical scope, to know how to think about these things clearly yet. They are very difficult questions, and I don’t think the ethical apparatus that has served us so far will deal with them, so I’m very much in favour of dealing with them on a case-by-case basis.

I [favour] using the process in law called casuistry, by which you accept that sometimes new evidence comes along so that you have to change your practice…To a lot of people that feels very unsafe, and they invoke slippery slope arguments: unless you draw the line somewhere it’s going to end up here or there. We have reason to believe that that doesn’t happen at all. In the UK, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority was able to draw up very sensible guidelines for where we are so far that were in some ways quite liberal, allowing a lot of research to happen, but at the same time were cautious…Some scientists found them restricting, which is probably a good thing. It’s a good sign if scientists find them a bit too restricting. So I see no reason why that can’t be done on a case-by-case basis rather than by grand ethical schemes that will collapse when the technology moves on.

William Kolkey is reading for a  DPhil in History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxonian Review.

*Philip Ball spoke in a speaker series organised by Blackwell’s Books at Oxford. Future events are as follows:

Sunday 6th March, 6pm – 7.30pm

Apostolos Doxiadis: “Quest Myths: From Numbers to Stories”
Blackwell Bookshop, 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford. Please telephone 01865 333623.
Tickets are £2 and are available from the Customer Service Department, Blackwell’s Bookshop.

We are thrilled to announce an event with Apostolos Doxiadis taking place on Sunday 6th March from 6pm to 7.30pm. In his talk entitled “Modern Quest Myths: From Numbers to Stories”, Apostolos Doxiadis will speak about his books Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture and Logicomix, as an introduction to a discussion about their theme and forms.

Tuesday 8th March, 4.30pm
Deborah Harkness: “A Discovery of Witches”
Exclusive talk and walking tour – please note, places are limited
Blackwell Bookshop, 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford. Tickets: £5

Join Deborah Harkness author of the highly anticipated debut novel, “A Discovery of Witches” on a magical tour of Oxford. Starting at Blackwell’s bookshop, you will have the opportunity to chat with the author in Caffe Nero, enjoying a tea or coffee included in the ticket price. Hear about how Blackwell’s itself appears in the novel before moving onwards to visit other locations in Oxford, learning about the history of the famous locations alongside the author’s own experiences and reference points within the novel.

Thursday 17th March at 7pm
Sara Paretsky
Blackwell Bookshop, 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford. Tickets: £2

Internationally bestselling author Sara Paretsky will be with us on Thursday 17th March at 7pm to talk about her latest book, Body Work. Sara Paretsky’s critically acclaimed V. I. Warshawski series has revolutionised female characterisation in mystery writing since 1982. Body Work is the fourteenth outing in the series.

Richard Watson is a writer and consultant, who specialises in scenario-planning and the analysis of trends. On 27 January, Watson spoke at Blackwell’s in Oxford about his newest book Future Minds: How the Digital Age is Changing our Minds, Why this Matters, and What We Can Do about It (2010). Future Minds expresses concern about the pernicious effects of technology on the brain, arguing that the Internet and contemporary multimedia impair the ability to think deeply and creatively. The book enters an ongoing discussion about the Internet’s influence on cognitive ability (see articles by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal), but is unique in its focus on ways to curb our addiction to technology. He spoke to the Oxonian Review about the relative rate of contemporary innovation and the relationship between technology and education. For more about Richard Watson, visit What’s Next and Future Files & Future Minds.

You argue that technology can impair the development of important skill sets, namely the ability to think deeply and creatively.

That’s really my focus. What are these technologies doing to our thinking? But we’ve got to be careful because obviously there are different types of technology and equally there are different types of thinking. And I think [technology] is enhancing different types of thinking but it is eroding others.

Should recourse to technology in the classroom be limited?

I think it should. I need more time to think about how that works…But I think fundamentally we need to ask: What kind of thinking are we after? What kind of technology best supports that? I would regard pencils and papers and books as much a technology as a blackboard. So we need to think very hard about what we’re trying to achieve and what are the best tools for the job…There should be periods when technology is switched off. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you are trying to cram information, then by all means use a computer, use a whiteboard. But if you’re trying to do more than that, to understand context—for instance, what was the Battle of Britain and why did it happen?—then I think that needs physical interaction.

You criticise the current emphasis that schools place on quantitative analysis. Do we change the curriculum to give more emphasise to the humanities?

Yes, and this isn’t particularly my view. It is Ken Robinson’s more than anyone else’s. But I think we are only educating one half of our brain: the left logical side…The education system is still producing the same type of person and the world has changed. Bear in mind if you’re 5 years old and starting education, the world when you graduate is going to be an incredibly different place. It seems to me we’re training people for the wrong skills… The thing that has real value is the ability to relate to other people physically and emotionally. We talk about the information economy ad nauseam but we don’t really educate for it, and so creativity is sort of relegated…It’s not a real subject. The real subjects are like law and medicine. But these other things have equal weight…Essentially the education system is set up to say there’s a right answer for everything. Learn it; go and apply it. That’s true if you’re an engineer, and for a lot of scientists, there is one answer. But in a lot of areas, there isn’t. There are lots of different answers…We essentially teach convergent thinking: there’s one right answer. And actually, if you want a culture of innovation, you need to encourage divergent thinking.

In the United States there’s a big scare that the Chinese are out-educating Americans in the maths and sciences. Do you think these fears are missing the point?

Someone sent me an e-mail last night and it’s got a great slogan. They’ve got this campaign called “No right brain left behind”. It’s fabulous; I love that. I read a statistic recently. It said that 90% of PhDs in science and engineering reside in Asia…The issues in America are healthcare, obviously, but also education. The same is true in Britain. We are falling behind…We just don’t know what’s about to hit us. The Chinese take education so seriously. There are certain subjects you can’t teach unless you have a certain grade in that subject. Here, you can fail maths four times and eventually pass and then teach maths. You could not do that in China.

The interesting thing about China [and a few other countries] is that they’ve got a model that’s all about the production of low-cost stuff. The challenge now is to move up the value chain; they’ve got to start not just producing this stuff. They’ve got to start inventing. Now to what extent can they do that? To what extent is Silicon Valley dependent on the American Dream and that political system of freedom, etc.? Some people say you can’t have an innovation economy without freedom, but those people were probably also saying you can’t have capitalism without democracy, and the Chinese have proved that completely wrong. My feeling is that there are issues [correlating] serious innovation and creativity and originality. Unless you have openness and freedom, [innovation] could be quite constrained. I’ve heard a lot of anecdotal stuff from McKinsey. When they hire Indian and particularly Chinese graduates, there is a sort of groupthink going on there. They’re not going to challenge the teacher in a different direction. And for serious innovation you need that disruptive element; you need the wise ass. And maybe the Chinese system isn’t creating that, but maybe I don’t know enough about it.

In your talk, you said that Alvin Toffler was 30 years ahead of his time. You also invoked phrases of another mid-century analyst of technological change, Marshall McLuhan, such as “the global village” and “the medium is the message”. To me this suggests that Toffler wasn’t ahead of his time at all, but rather these technological changes have always been with us, and I wonder whether this is merely a change in pace?

There’s a quote I use from William Gibson: “The Future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed.” Change always comes from the fringe…If you want to see the future, there are certain places you can go and you’ll get it. The history of prediction is appalling. It’s not that they’re wrong; it’s that their timing stinks. They are too optimistic about how quickly change is going to happen. There’s an argument that says change is accelerating; that it’s happening quicker than it used to. A lot of people are [predicting] what’s going to happen in the future, and [their predictions] are probably a decade off. There’s also the classic mistake of saying x will replace y. It’s a sort of binary argument. And actually it’s not like that. [For example] physical newspapers will not die. They may be an exception rather than the rule, and the same with books. There are going to be multiple futures and you can buy into the future you want.

With Toffler, that’s what’s been the case. There’s a really good book called Future Hype, written by an American computer scientist, who tries to put the predictions of technology into some kind of a historical context, and it’s really interesting looking at what people say now versus what they said 100 years ago. To some extent, I think his argument is that compared to the level of change we talk about now, there was actually more change during the Industrial Revolution. It was far more rapid, far more impactful. In a sense, there’s no reason to be anxious—it’s all nothing.

You encourage people to occasionally isolate themselves from technology and offer advice for how to do this: experiencing the outdoors, turning off mobile phones whilst on vacation, etc. But how optimistic are you that people will voluntarily remove technology from their lives?

[Technology] is a bit like drugs, cocaine, and alcohol. It’s rather satisfying if you are involved in social networks; [they] make you feel in control and important…A study was done on cell phone use, and [the researchers] withdrew the cell phone and a few other things, and the physical and emotional symptoms were exactly the same as going cold turkey from serious drug addiction. I don’t think we’re going to acknowledge this as a problem for 5 to 10 years minimum. I then think it will be acknowledged. South Korea and America are the only countries that have Internet addiction clinics at the moment. I think it will become more common 15 to 20 years down the line. Even so, most people will deny that they have a problem.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review. William Kolkey is reading for a DPhil in History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxonian Review.

California  State Senator Fran Pavley (D-Santa Monica) is one of the most progressive environmental legislators in America. Her notable accomplishments include authoring AB 1493 (a bill that made California the first state to drastically mandate the reduction of tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions) and AB 32 (a bill that requires, among other things, electric utilities to produce 33% of their power through renewables and mandates a cap-and-trade programme for emissions). These pioneering climate change laws have subsequently been adopted in other jurisdictions in the United States and within several provinces in Canada.

How dangerous is the lack of a comprehensive federal energy and climate change policy to America’s long-term economic prosperity?

This ongoing process is both dangerous and short-sighted. I think that we need Washington to reframe the debate away from climate change and energy security as “Sierra Club issues” and move toward encouraging the public to think of these sorts of issues as national security risks and economic liabilities. Business as usual is infeasible and will present a growing economic challenge to the world in coming years. Fortunately, it seems that lots of non-traditional proponents of better policy are emerging. For example, I have held focus sessions with senior military commanders at major bases in the western United States. These individuals, all of whom vary across the spectrum of political backgrounds, clearly iterated to me in our talks that there are substantiated links between climate change, energy security, and fossil fuel sources. Remember, these military leaders know that 60% of all our oil comes from foreign sources – and many of these countries do not have our best interests in mind.

Given that the United States’s aging grid infrastructure is poorly suited to handling decentralized renewable energy generation and that fossil fuel industries are often resistant to the development of alternative energy technologies, what role do you envision for renewable energy in the United States’s long-term energy mix?

It must be part of the energy mix, there is no question about that. It is only a matter of how much. We want a clean and secure energy future for California and the country as a whole, but we do not want to pick a winner or favour a particular resource for subsidies/support. There are progressive policy measures that can be implemented to compensate for some of the inhibiting factors that you mentioned in the question. For example, we currently have a renewable energy portfolio standard that requires that utilities purchase 20% of their energy from clean energy sources by 2020. AB 32, a bill that I was heavily involved in, ramps it up to 33% in the near future and engages the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Air Resources Board – an integrated approach that is essential. I think that there are serious challenges, so clever policy backing will be needed if renewables are to realize their potential.

California’s Proposition 23, often referred to as the “dirty oil proposition” for its rollback of AB 32, was recently defeated by California voters. It was financed heavily by wealthy out-of-state fossil fuel interests which tried to tell voters that they should not concern themselves with environmental policy in the midst of a major recession. Is this result an isolated California phenomenon, or does it have broader applicability to future US energy policy by clearly showing that Americans are getting serious about reducing energy dependency and fossil fuel-related  environmental degradation?

Well, a clean energy future is certain to spur economic advances, so let me say that any emphasis on the recession from the out-of-state interests was likely misplaced. Incredible innovators and entrepreneurs from across California are proving that it is possible to develop strong alternative energy capacity here that encourages innovation, provides jobs, and gives us cleaner air.  Thousands of new businesses and job opportunities will be created in the emerging green sector, from weatherizing to research to engineering. Economic growth and environmental sustainability are not necessarily contradictory and people recognize that, as evidenced in this result. In California, pretty much everyone is onboard with letting the market decide about the best decisions for energy, with state support to level the playing field with fossil fuels. This is contrasted with some federal decisions, such as the incredible subsidies currently offered to corn ethanol (politically popular in certain parts of the country but not necessarily the most environmentally benign). We are seeing conflicting signals, so there is no consensus on what this result means outside of California.

But as the “Saudi Arabia of coal”, the United States possesses vast fossil fuel sources. At this key inflection point, how should these resources be developed? Should the country focus on its domestic energy strengths, regardless of the environmental toll?

One of the most difficult things facing the US is the transition period. These resources will inevitably be at least partially extracted, so we need to find cost-effective and environmentally benign solutions in the short-term and long-term. We have lots of states that are very reliant on fossil fuel industries and it isn’t possible to just abandon them altogether. Here in California, we don’t have coal-fired plants and we passed a law a number of years ago that prohibits us from buying coal from nearby sources. There isn’t huge support for offshore oil here either. Yet it is a tough question – how do we reduce dependence on coal and other fossil fuels while simultaneously ramping up renewable deployment? In particular, I am largely focused on, and interested in, energy efficiency. We are already at a good place in this hugely important area, as California uses less energy per capita than virtually any other state. We have learned in California that investing in energy efficiency is far less expensive than bringing new generation onboard.

Other countries are interested in coordination and sharing of ideas and we are willing to share it. In particular, we are going to experiment with new policy mechanisms in the future – feed-in tariffs, distributed generation from clean sources like the run of the river hydro in British Columbia (Canada) – so I think that there are alternatives to business as usual and domestic fossil fuel resources are not always the best option.

Joel Krupa graduated in 2010 with an MSc in Environmental Policy from Mansfield College, Oxford.

Robert Bateman is one of the world’s premier wildlife artists, naturalists, and environmentalists. His works have been presented at venues including the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the Tryon Gallery in London, and the Russian State Museum in St Petersburg, and he has the distinction of holding the longest running exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution for any living artist. Bateman, an officer of the Order of Canada, has won countless awards and has received a dozen honorary doctorates. A passionate conservationist, he sat down with Joel Krupa to discuss tips for would-be environmental advocates and how to bridge the growing disconnect between the modern and the natural world.

You are generally regarded as a leading international voice for biodiversity preservation and climate change advocacy. What role do you envision for artists of all persuasions—visual, writing, film, fashion, and others—in creating a more environmentally conscious society and, in particular, a more environmentally conscious next generation of youth?

I think that all of the arts have a place to play in this transition. Of the arts, film is perhaps the most important. Films like Sir David Attenborough’s Life and Planet Earth are the most valuable and are educating millions, while current environmental affairs documentaries by people like David Suzuki are also extremely important for keeping people apprised of ongoing situations. However, all the arts are essential and each will need to find a unique niche in an increasingly nature deficient society.

Nature-deficit disorder is one of your favourite causes. First coined by Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods, it describes the various behavioural problems among young people that result from limited engagement with the outdoors. It is an increasingly popular term among educators and others that interact with children on a day-to-day basis and see the disorder’s pervasive symptoms. Do you think kids’ disinterest in the natural world is as serious as Louv contends?

I consider this epidemic even more serious than Richard Louv states. In fact, it could have serious implications for the future of humankind. I know this sounds unnecessarily dire, but humankind’s fate is inextricably linked with nature. I am reminded of a cartoon I once saw of two young boys sitting on a step. One says to the other, “What are you going to be, if you grow up?” Obviously this is amusing, but it is not funny. That young boy may not live to a ripe old age for a variety of reasons, including depression, suicide, drug abuse, early onset diabetes, or self-inflicted accidents. Even if he does reach senior age, his brain will have been rewired through endless hours staring mindlessly at screens. He might be in his 50s, but his brain will be much younger. The questions begin to pile up. What kind of parent will he be? What kind of voter will be, especially when it comes to environmental issues? Will he even care about natural places, now that his sense of place is virtual? What sorts of stories will he tell his grandchildren—Grand Theft Auto ones? This technologically obsessed environment for young people is a juggernaut rolling over an entire generation.

So is time spent in nature during one’s formative years key to personal development?

Absolutely. An accumulating body of research in America, Britain, and continental Europe points to the fact that playing outside in nature during children’s formative years has a salutatory effect on all of the issues I mentioned in the previous question.

You have said that “My life has always been immersed in nature. It has been inspiring, adventurous and fun. I have been thrilled by everything from gorillas in the rainforests of the Congo to the penguins of the Antarctic. But none of these spectacular experiences has been any more enchanting than the nature I discovered as a young boy in the ravine below our backyard [in Toronto].” How can we make seemingly routine natural settings as engaging to individuals as some of the aforementioned breathtaking environs?

That is the most serious problem facing us. The idea that nature can be very exciting and cool only in certain areas is flawed. The appreciation of nature is slow, gradual, and subtle. It has very little sizzle. We seem to be increasingly producing a species of young people that requires sizzle and instant gratification, which is quite literally the antithesis of nature. Their world is louder, faster, and flashier. They are engrained into this world from the earliest childhood stages, starting with seemingly innocuous daily cartoons. It makes it much more difficult for them to do these subtle things without getting bored. Learning about nature doesn’t take skill or practice—it is completely natural—but if the brain has been rewired for high speed, individuals cannot get excited about it. We need to teach kids to enjoy the subtle.

A recent New York Times article stated that “Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.  Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.” What implications does this rewiring have for future environmental efforts, and how can it be reversed?

I should start by saying that there are marked advantages to being able to think and react quickly. Most of the skills can likely be harnessed for good causes. However, true and deep appreciation takes time and patience. My experience has shown that when children are exposed to experiential learning, they will naturally achieve a deeper understanding. So I believe that we just need to provide the right opportunities and facilities to make this switch happen. We also need to consider pedagogical shifts. For example, a PhD candidate recently asked me if we should be teaching environmental problems to young people. But I say absolutely not. This will get in the way of teaching about the sheer beauty of nature. We need to get away from a situation in which children know more about the Amazonian rainforest than they do about a nearby park or street—children need to learn about the natural elements of their neighbourhood in the same way in which they would grow to know the names of their friends.

Interestingly, the aforementioned New York Times article also mentions that educators, including organizations like your Get to Know programme, are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills. Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access, and mobile devices so they can teach on the students’ technological territory. Is it possible to use technology effectively to reconnect kids with the natural world?

It has been said that “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!” This argument has merit in that sense. It is definitely better than nothing and these efforts are key. Still, experiential learning in the field and living with nature in the real world is still of utmost importance. Developing that heart-based connection is essential.

Given the seemingly endless array of problems facing young people’s environmental future, what would you say to those who feel that it is tempting to give up and simply despair?

Nothing is ever final. Worry and despair about these issues, or any other world problem for that matter, is unproductive and senseless. I like to look to the future and I believe that there are more terrific young people nowadays than I have ever seen. They are not part of this growing majority of electronic device addicts and they are accomplishing many positive things. In fact, they use new-fangled things like social networking to achieve their admirable ends. In addition, nature-deficit disorder is such a huge problem that we need to extend beyond schools and tackle it from all angles—parks, governments, and especially parents. This stuff isn’t rocket science—going for a hike in nature every weekend just makes sense. Invite the friends. Invite the friend’s parents. Everyone can benefit. The average 14 year old in North America spends almost 7.5 hours per day, 7 per week, looking at an electronic screen. Surely, taking a hike for a few hours is not a big problem.

Any advice for up-and-coming or current environmental advocates?

In his book Biophilia, E.O. Wilson says that we should “fall in love with other living things”. If people develop a place for nature, all else will follow. Once you have this love, it is easy to begin a lifetime of being immersed in the natural world. If you can do something, do it. After you are done, step back and enjoy this wonderful world.

Joel Krupa graduated in 2010 with an MSc in Environmental Policy from Mansfield College, Oxford.

Against the backdrop of a British intellectual culture which Owen Hatherley quite rightly describes as “pretty moribund”, his voice stands out a mile. Like one of the visionary post-war brutalist buildings it championed, Hatherley’s first book Militant Modernism provided a brilliantly egregious burst of polemical white heat when it appeared in 2008. A timely reminder of the humane, collectivist origins of radical modernist architecture, Hatherley’s debut combined crisp readings of key players and oblique intersections (Brecht, Wyndham Lewis, Soviet Constructivism, Dizzee Rascal) with the sort of curt verbiage already familiar to readers of his influential blog “Sit Down Man, You’re A Bloody Tragedy”.

Now, Hatherley’s widely anticipated second work, A Guide To The New Ruins of Great Britain, sets out to deconstruct the architectural legacy of New Labour’s so-called Urban Renaissance. With chapters on 11 UK cities, New Ruins is a caustic survey of a national landscape that has undergone profound, possibly calamitous change over the past 13 years.

As Oxford is not one of those cities featured in the book, we decided to combine today’s interview with a brief tour of the city’s modernist highlights, from the Beehive Building at St John’s College (built in the late 1950s, it is a belated entry of the modern movement) to James Stirling’s sci-fi Florey Building on St Clements and Arne Jacobson’s showpiece of Scandinavian cool, St Catz. Hatherley’s immediate reaction is somewhat ambivalent. “I kept thinking of Pevsner’s Visual Planning and the Picturesque”, he says as we begin the post-tour interview, “of his comparison between Oxford quadrangles and London County Council estates in Roehampton, the sense of flowing space, the sense of space under and space between. It’s a fantastic way of building a city.

“But the problem in Oxford is that it’s all completely private. And this is the case with many estates now: you stick in gates, you put in defensible space, you try to privatize all those flowing spaces. It’s fantastic to go somewhere like Berlin or Warsaw, where that kind of courtyard planning is absolutely everywhere, and no one stops you from using it. Despite our obsession with defensible space, we have crime rates that are far higher than Berlin or Warsaw or Brussels—all these cities that are much freer about public space. Those two things strike me as being directly linked.”

Okay, putting Oxford aside for the moment, could you outline the premise of New Ruins?

It starts with happenstance really. I was commissioned by Building Design to write a series about cities in recession. Over the course of doing this I just thought, no one’s writing about this. The way British architecture’s written about is analogous with British football. In both cases you’ve got a basic entity that’s inflated. In football it’s inflated by the fact that the Premier League imports lots of foreign players, which gives it an importance actual English football just doesn’t warrant; and similarly with British architecture. Because lots of British firms work abroad, and because everyone goes to the Architectural Association or the Bartlett to study, ergo British architecture must be good. But it’s dreadful. So partly it was that. And also it seemed like something was coming to an end.

Could you say exactly what you mean by that?

That New Labour’s project could not be understood merely as a continuation of Thatcherism. It was an adaptation of Thatcherism, a kind of urban version of it amongst other things. Although under New Labour suburbia grew massively (things like the Thames Gateway, which is just suburbia on a Los Angeles model), at the same time there’s a huge amount of rhetoric about the cities and the Urban Renaissance and so forth, which was in some cases backed up by money and ministerial pressure.

I wanted to say: okay, we’ve built all this stuff in the centre of cities, what’s it all worth? Partly because of the way cities were bashed in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I think people have inured themselves to accepting things. When there are new developments, everyone thinks: well at least there will be more jobs. So a lot of people who should’ve known better accepted it all. I thought New Labour’s basic premise was right. Cities are incredibly important things. We need to be building them and conserving them, building up their power and influence and independence. I think this is all true. I just think that how they did it—via private finance initiatives, luxury flats, speculation etc.—was fairly disastrous, and the architectural results, with few exceptions, were very, very poor.

And I’d obviously written this defence of modernism, or a defence of a particular idea of modernism: militant modernism. And in some ways you couldn’t understand these new developments as purely Thatcherite, you couldn’t understand them as purely postmodernist. Because although the Thames Gateway and the suburbs and the Barratt homes were all totally pomo, all the things that were built in the centres of cities were modernist in some sense. But it’s a modernism that’s very different from the modernism that was briefly popular in the UK between the ‘50s and ‘70s. So a lot of the book is about this: the fact that we’ve had this shift to the cities, this shift to modernism again, and what differentiates it from previous ideas of the city and previous ideas of modernism in Britain.

Do you think there might be a more affirmative postscript to all this? Is there scope for a more worthwhile modernism to emerge in Britain?

I don’t know. I think first of all this will lead to a massive counter-reaction, which you can already see. People look at the new towers in say East London or Manchester, and the same old criticisms are coming up. The Tories have quite explicitly set themselves against density and urbanity. “Garden grabbing” is the phrase they’ve used.

But they know that their power bases are not the cities, especially with Labour’s very unexpected strong showing in London and in the north [in the 2010 general election]. So that’s dead now. The Urban Renaissance has been and gone. The cities are going to return very much to the state they were in in the 1980s.

Counter to that, I’d love to look at contemporary Leeds or Manchester or Sheffield and say: hooray, we’ve now got these skylines and towers and we’ve rebuilt these cities! But with the exception of bits of Manchester, where it’s been done well, it’s just really poor. It’s enclosed space, and it’s very shoddy architecturally. I don’t really want to defend any of it.

None at all?

Very little. I mean, when I think of new buildings that I’ve liked, or new architects that have interested me, they’re actually nearer to certain pomo ideas. I mean the building I give the most praise to in the whole book is Nottingham Contemporary, which I would regard as a modernist building, but not in the Terence Conran sense we’ve had foisted upon us for the last 15 years. It’s quite a strange and intellectual building. The architects I find myself talking to, or that want to talk to me, are people like Fashion Architecture Taste or Agents of Change, who are basically pomo. And in both cases I like their ideas more than I like their actual buildings.

Left-wing political discourse is obviously central to your writing about architecture. What do you think of the British left in 2010?

I’m tempted by two different poles. One of which is to see New Labour as the final death of the Labour Party. Because it was just so much worse than everyone thought it was going to be. People thought that New Labour would be, at the very least, a kind of Europeanized movement, that it would be like a European Social Democratic party. It wasn’t going to be socialist, but it was going to restore some kind of European normality to the country. And instead, old corruption became more powerful than it ever was. Property and speculation, and all these pre-industrial versions of moneymaking just completely took over the country, even more than they had done under Thatcher. The results of that are going to be disastrous; they’re going to last for decades. And it was under a Labour government.

On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be any other game in town. I don’t think any of the far-left parties are in a strong position. The Greens are middle-class lifestyle politics, which winds me up for various reasons. There’s also the fact that the Britain I write about, the Britain I have some connection to, went out and voted for Labour en masse in the election in May. And I guess lots of people think this is a huge opportunity. Everything’s been thrown up in the air, and Labour is our only vehicle.

So what would you like to see the Labour Party and the left generally doing over the next decade?

I’d like to see a thought about unionizing people who aren’t unionized, for one thing. There’s this phrase: “negative solidarity”. Since the credit crunch there’s this thing whereby someone goes on strike and people go “well, I haven’t got a pension, why should they have one?” And that shows how far things have gone. This basic sense of solidarity and almost common sense that one would’ve thought we might have acquired in the 1880s has now gone. [That is,] this basic sense that, “well they’ve managed to get better pay and conditions, maybe if we joined a union, maybe if we struck, we would too.” But people don’t have that thought, and I find that terrifying.

So one thing that would be good to see would be a build up of the Labour Party and the unions in places like call centres and offices, which are completely proletarianized. Even if people in those jobs don’t think of themselves as proletarians, they are. Their pay and conditions are much worse than manual labourers. I’d like to see those people being mobilized. How one does it I don’t know.

Militant Modernism was described by Jonathan Meades as “a deflected Bildungsroman”. Could you talk a bit about your background, how you were “formed”?

(Laughs.) I could do. I’m always being told off about this by my girlfriend. I could do…

You don’t have to…

No, I’ll do it. It’s complicated. I see my background as being part of the working class, a section of the working class we’re now encouraged to believe didn’t exist. This version of the racist lumpen working class winds me up. You know, this notion of costermongers and pearly queens and gangsters who love their mums: the working class journalists like Michael Collins write about. Because my family in a quite complicated, unusual way were still indisputably members of the working class. They were products of the movement, I guess, of the Trade Unions and the Labour Party and the Communist Party. And that made them what they were, and that then made me what I am. I know it was a minority, I know that part of the working class was relatively small. But it was a sizeable minority. It was a minority that at certain points—1945 most obviously—swayed the rest of the working class. And I mourn its passing enormously. But I think it’s a thing that is still in people’s memories, and it’s revivable.

And how about place. You grew up in Southampton. Did that have much of an impact?

It had a big impact. Southampton’s a strange place. No one really thinks about the industrial south, partly because there’s less of it. Places like Plymouth, Southampton, and Portsmouth, or Reading or Slough or Luton, they aren’t really thought about. But they’re there, and they’re interesting.

What about the architecture in Southampton?

There’s a place I get very excited about called Wyndham Court, a council estate just by the station. It’s an absolutely wonderful building and of course everyone hates it. I guess there’s this collective embarrassment in cities that got bombed and rebuilt themselves. You see it in Southampton, and you see it in Sheffield, and I’m sure you’d see it in Coventry. Places where most of the architecture dates from the ‘60s and it’s just loathed. You know, in some places the ‘60s had fairly deleterious effects. In Glasgow a lot of really worthwhile stuff went in favour of quite dull ‘60s stuff. But in Southampton and Sheffield, all the really interesting civic architecture dates from between 1945 and 1975. And I want to shake people and go: look at this stuff, it’s brilliant, this is what makes this city special! But instead they want to pretend they’re a Victorian holiday village. Or Iowa.

So how would you defend post-war architecture to the sceptics?

How long have you got? I think partly, it’s fairly simple. It’s partly about looking at it without prejudice. I think people have a knee-jerk reaction to it that’s not very sophisticated. It doesn’t take that much to convince people.

That demolition programme on Channel 4 is absolutely appalling. I mean, in no other art form would you be allowed to do that. Just imagine, “which paintings shall be destroyed, which books shall be burned?” But it’s very interesting that in the Gateshead episode, [brutalist architect] Owen Luder actually turned up and argued with them. Because none of the other architects did that. Architects are very contrite about what they did in the ‘60s. I think after their bashing by Prince Charles and by the tabloid press, they didn’t want to talk to anyone. So it was great to see Owen Luder going on there, with all these people saying “oh it’s a bloody eyesore”. And Luder was saying, “well, it’s like this because of this, and this is like that because of that, and imagine if we did this with this.” And he was swaying people.

Because people don’t think about it. People go: it’s a concrete monstrosity, instant knee-jerk reaction. I find, especially when I’m with people, it’s surprisingly easy to convince people these buildings are good. But no one has ever tried to do so.

So do you think its merely a case of education?

I think we’re one of the most architecturally illiterate societies in the world. There are certain incredibly important things that don’t turn up in the curriculum, and I find it so interesting that they’re not. No one learns about economics and no one learns about architecture, and they’re two of the most important things. At every single moment of your life you are in some way intersecting with economics and architecture. That’s what fascinates me about architecture. The fact that it’s not an autonomous art form, so you can map it politically very easily. Because the power that builds, builds.

So I think it’s partly a case of education. But that knee-jerk reaction isn’t solely aesthetic. It’s the use of concrete, but it’s also the mistakes of the ‘70s and ‘80s. On the one hand it’s a revulsion to particular materials. And there’s a labour theory aspect. I think people look at a traditional wall and think, there’s work been put into that. Even though, looking at something like St Catz today, the amount of workmanship in that is roughly on the level of your average gothic cathedral. But because it’s not ornamental people don’t see that. So again it’s a case of lack of education.

But also more fundamentally, we’ve been told that what happened between 1945 and 1979 was a massive mistake that ended in chaos, and I think that totally colours the architectural reaction. You can see it by the way people always describe it as “Eastern Bloc”. There’s this sense that there’s something socialist about it, a sense that it’s collective. Everyone doesn’t have their own garden, everyone doesn’t have their bit of hedge, everyone doesn’t have a fence, everyone doesn’t have their obsessive defensible bit of space.

The thing that excites me about modernism isn’t Corbusian villas, it’s places like [seminal brutalist housing estate in Sheffield] Park Hill, it’s that sense of people living collectively, and making a decent fist of it. And I think that’s incredibly valuable. I think suburbia is a depoliticizing force. I don’t much like metroplitan dismissals of suburbia either, because there are interesting things about it. But when I go to somewhere like Park Hill or [late-modernist housing estate in Newcastle] Byker Wall, I think: this is a fine way to live, I’d love to live in a place like this. I live in a Rachmanite space carved out on top of a chip shop. I’d love to live somewhere that’s been built with people in mind, which is not the case with the majority of buildings.

Finally, what are your hopes for the new century?

Well that we get through it, for one thing.

You think there’s a risk we might not?

I think we’re living through very dark times. I mean even the immediate future worries me. The way the financial crisis seemed like this little opening that’s closed so quickly. Very quickly it’s gone from an argument about the death of neoliberalism and bailing out the bankers to an argument about the deficit and cutting unemployment benefits. It’s shocking how easily they’ve managed to do it. I think people’s solidarity was broken so much in the ‘80s and ‘90s that it’s going to be such a struggle to rebuild it. But I think it has to be rebuilt, or we’re in serious, serious trouble.

I’m an inveterate socialist and my idea of what the future can still look like is of a collective and industrial society. And in some ways, there’s massive potential in the changeover that will have to happen to alternative technologies. There are so many ways we can rethink technology and the city and architecture. All these things that have been so visibly rammed down our throats for the last 30 years are so visibly bankrupt [that] there’s this massive potential right now. I’d like to end on an optimistic note so let’s stop there before I start talking about the apocalypse.

Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English literature at St John’s College, Oxford. Alex is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.